Unwritten Rules Page 4

  It’s quiet in the mornings out in the bullpen, even with players jostling for who can get to the ballpark first and show the coaches how serious they are about training, a strange game of chicken where they get there earlier and earlier.

  “Look at them.” Eugenio points toward where their teammates are out on the field, a few jogging. “What complete eyewash.”

  “You’re just mad because someone took your parking spot this morning.”

  “Maybe.” Eugenio’s cheeks go a little pink.

  Zach watches him, then looks away briefly, in case his expression mirrors his.

  Eugenio is doing warmups, oblivious to Zach’s reaction. He’s going through his stretches kind of lazily, like he’s trying not to nod off during them, even though Zach brought him two double-shots of espresso, each so sweet that they made his teeth hurt in sympathy, and Eugenio downed them both.

  “You look like you could use some sleep,” Zach says.

  “My place is not conducive to sleep. It’s too quiet without other people there.” He yawns. “Wish I’d gotten a place with a pool.”

  “There’s a pool where I’m staying.” And Zach definitely doesn’t imagine Eugenio cutting through the lanes in it or pulling himself up on the side, water in rivulets down his back.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not, like, Olympic size, but it’s fine for laps.”

  “Maybe I can come check it out some time. You know, in exchange for dinner or something?”

  “Uh, sure.” And Zach’s heart rate, which was calm as he went through his morning routine, accelerates.

  “We should probably game-plan,” Eugenio says. Like they haven’t been planning with D’Spara and the pitchers and the analytics guys.

  “It’s spring training. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “For some of us it does.”

  And it’d be different with Eugenio in Zach’s rental unit, sitting on his couch, expansively explaining scouting reports, in a place where Zach doesn’t have the excuse of crosstalk and ambient noise to watch him as intently as he is now. A place separate from the ballpark, where it’s easier to forget all the reasons he can’t let himself look—that they’re teammates. That Eugenio doesn’t mean anything by inviting himself over other than wanting to secure a roster spot and a meal. That whatever he meant by wanting someone there when he fell asleep was a desire for white noise and familiar chatter. And not Zach in bed with him.

  Things Zach wills himself to remember, even if it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so. “Yeah, maybe some other time,” he says, belatedly, trying for the kind of blow-off statement that veteran guys use to quash hopeful rookies. It must work too well, because Eugenio doesn’t say anything for a long minute, one that’s interrupted when D’Spara comes to tell them to get moving.

  Eugenio hustles out, not waiting for Zach, though he glances at him with an expression Zach would almost call regretful if he doesn’t know better, like Eugenio wishes he didn’t ask the question in the first place. Something Zach feels as well. But it’s too late to change his answer without some bigger explanation, some justification for why he both wants, and therefore cannot have, Eugenio in his space. So he pulls himself up and goes out to the field to run drills alone.

  Chapter Four

  Zach’s parents call that night. They’re on video, and even with the sound turned all the way up and his headphones on, it’s sometimes a little hard to track their conversation, mostly because they talk to each other as much as they talk to him.

  “You having a good time?” his mother asks, as if he’s away at sleepaway camp and not playing professional baseball.

  “Yeah, Mom, making friends and everything.” He tells them about the game coming up, their first of spring training, where he’ll catch one or two innings and take maybe two at-bats. “There’s another guy here. Another catcher. He’s, uh, pretty good.”

  “Should you be worried?”

  He should be, even if it’s hard to worry in the bright Arizona mornings, Eugenio bringing him breakfast and receiving his coffee and telling him about some cooking show he’s watching or something silly one of the minor leaguers said. And even if he were, he doesn’t want to transfer that worry to her. “No, nothing like that.”

  She changes the subject anyway. “Your brother’s coming home for Pesach.”

  And Zach meant to check the dates, just on the off chance he’s playing anywhere on the East Coast. He brings them up on his phone, toggling between the Elephants’ schedule and a calendar of Jewish holidays. “Sorry. It looks like I’m gonna be in Kansas City.”

  “Can you Skype in for part of the seder? It would be nice to see you.”

  He could ask for the days off, though there isn’t really an option other than being listed as day-to-day, like Judaism is the same as a tweaked hamstring. But it would likely antagonize the front office, something less manageable than whatever loneliness he’ll feel when he doesn’t go.

  “Charna Friedman and her daughter will be there,” his mother adds as an enticement, because his parents have taken to inviting their friends with daughters his age to dinner whenever possible. One that has the opposite effect.

  “How’s everyone at home?” Zach asks. And if his parents notice his deflection, neither mentions it.

  They tell him about his brother’s law practice, about his sister’s students, who are building an underwater robot for a competition. About the perpetual miasma that is Baltimore County politics. His father has been petitioning to get a little strip of grass near their house designated a park and named for a longtime member of their shul who passed away last year. It’s a whole process, one that his father relates in enough detail that, if Zach wanted to, he could probably get every highway median in Baltimore named for a different third-string Oysters outfielder.

  They’re holding a fundraiser at their house for a county council member who, in exchange for canapés, has promised to expedite the process.

  “It would be nice,” his mother says, “if you could put in an appearance.”

  “Email me the date.” Though his mother just tells it to him anyway, and he has to scramble to find a pen to write it down.

  * * *

  Their first game of spring training goes well until it doesn’t.

  Zach has the first inning, and there’s a lot of fanfare: a ceremonial opening pitch from a former player to a standing ovation. A comically large American flag unfurled on the field, the grounds crew holding it like kids holding the parachute in gym class. A flyover so loud he takes his hearing aid out. Baseball and all its attendant rah-rah pageantry.

  Braxton, their starting pitcher, was keyed up before the game—or keyed up for him, anyway—and Zach went over their plan more than once, even though the game is essentially an excuse for Braxton to wave his hat at the crowd and embarrass the opposing lineup with his curveball. Braxton goes and waves his hat and fans the first batter, who swings over his curve for a strikeout.

  Zach pounds his mitt and calls for another, and another, a one-two-three at-bat, which is over so quickly that the Friars player doesn’t seem to realize it’s done. Easy, the way things are in spring training, before the seriousness of the season.

  Angelides hits third. He’s a catcher, and built like one, broad and square, his name forming an arc around the numbers on his jersey. He has a reputation for being an explosive hitter with a similarly explosive temper, and he strides into the batter’s box like he wants to start a fight.

  Zach calls for a fastball, and Braxton sends him one. It’s outside the zone, and Angelides doesn’t bother to swing at it. Zach is tempted to try to frame it just to see what happens, moving his glove to see if he can convince the ump it’s a strike. A changeup next, and the pitch is all the words that Zach has heard commentators use to describe pitches and his father use to describe uncared-for fabrics—nasty, filthy, disgu
sting, beautiful. The kind of pitch that makes Braxton, despite his mumbled press conferences, the face of their franchise.

  Angelides takes the bait, swinging too early, and muttering to himself like he’s ashamed of taking a bad hack.

  The next one doesn’t fool him. Instead, he barrels it, making the kind of assured ringing thwack particular to baseball, the wood-meets-leather noise when a hitter gets every single fiber and stitch of a ball. But whatever deities govern baseball are apparently listening to Zach’s half-formed prayers, because there’s a wind blowing in, one of the hot desert ones like the breath of a forgotten god, and it deadens the ball before it leaves the park, right into the waiting glove of an outfielder.

  Zach curses in relief and then gets up out of his crouch to head for the dugout. There, he gets some Gatorade and a handful of seeds, because baseball is a sport you’re encouraged to eat during.

  Eugenio sits on the bench next to him, tapping his fingers arrhythmically, flexing his feet in their spikes, and it’s all so obviously screaming nervous that Zach almost wonders if it’s a put-on, until he sees that Eugenio is taking tiny sips of water from a cup the way Zach does when he has the flu.

  “You doing okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Eugenio says through clenched teeth. He gears up, clipping on his leg guards and putting on his chest protector, his catcher’s cap, mask up on his forehead. One of his hands is shaking.

  “Don’t throw up on home plate. We’ll need a good strike zone from that umpire at some point.”

  Eugenio doesn’t laugh, and Zach doesn’t know what he should say, since there isn’t really a way to summarize “I want you to be good so you can stick around, but not so good that I get traded or demoted,” so he just says, “Breathe.”

  Eugenio pauses from what he’s doing, glancing up and giving him a half smile. And when he gets out to the plate, he doesn’t throw up, but he does kind of fuck up.

  He gets two quick, merciful outs, and Zach is momentarily grateful for the utter apathy with which many players take their first few spring training at-bats.

  The next Friars hitter doesn’t agree, though.

  Out on the mound, Johnson rosins his hands between pitches, clapping them together in a white burst of powder. Eugenio signals for a low strike. Or it would be if he didn’t jerk his glove up to make it look more like a strike when he catches it. It’s noticeable: to Johnson, to the batter, to Eugenio, and definitely to the umpire, who calls it a ball instead. Eugenio says something to him, which isn’t unusual—guys often ask umps for locations of where they thought a pitch crossed the plate in order to better understand the zone—and the ump steps back, and, shit, they should not be antagonizing umpires over the first strike zone of a long season.

  Johnson throws another strike to the same location, and Eugenio does the same thing, pulling the ball higher into the strike zone to frame it as a strike, which it already was—a noticeable flapping motion with his mitt, as if to say to the ump, hey Blue, you asked for a strike, so let me show you what one looks like.

  D’Spara is standing on the steps to the dugout, observing the whole thing, a clipboard balanced on his stomach. He’s wearing a look of increasing despair, a frown stamped under his prodigious mustache.

  Johnson goes into his windup, rotating the ball in his glove obviously enough that even Zach can tell that he’s tipping—letting the opposing batter know what kind of pitch is coming based on the way his fingers are splayed around the ball.

  “You seeing this?” D’Spara says. “What a fucking cluster.”

  Johnson throws, and it’s a curveball coming out of his hands, a curveball as it nears the plate, a curveball as it dives below the strike zone into Eugenio’s waiting mitt, and the Friars batter—who’s a light-hitting shortstop mostly in the lineup for his defense—doesn’t so much as spit at it. Three balls, no strikes.

  D’Spara gestures the sign for a walk at Eugenio, hands going through the familiar signals. Eugenio has to see it. Hell, even the other team must recognize it. Yet Eugenio calls for another strike, one that the Friars hitter fouls back, off the netting separating spectators from the field.

  And it happens again. D’Spara motions for a ball; Eugenio calls for a strike; the Friars hitter fouls it away. And again. It turns into one of those at-bats that goes on so long that Zach tries to tune it out, the kind they show on SportsCenter as if to say “Isn’t baseball slow? Isn’t baseball boring?”

  Next to Zach, D’Spara is chomping on a handful of Tums that smell like mint and artificial fruit.

  “I can talk with Morales,” Zach says.

  “You better, because what the fuck?”

  The Friars hitter finally strikes out. Eugenio comes back into the dugout, and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t get a drink of Gatorade or unclip his gear or do anything more than disappear into the tunnel leading to the clubhouse.

  And Zach considers the possibilities of the conversation he’s about to go have, including reassuring Eugenio he’s secure in a roster spot that Zach is also competing for, and then follows.

  When he gets to the clubhouse, Eugenio is in the process of dumping his gear in a careless pile next to his stall. “I know,” he says, before Zach can say anything.

  Eugenio goes into the kitchen suite, one where clubhouse workers and catering staff already laid out food for after the game, and Zach can hear him run the water from the sink. When he comes back, his cheeks and forehead are wet, along with the ends of his hair, like he dunked his entire head.

  “I know,” he says again, and he drops into the chair in front of his stall. Zach watches him spend a long minute looking at where his jerseys are hung up neatly, at where his batting gloves are stacked, his spikes and tape and all the other various things that make up their uniforms.

  “When I first came up,” Zach says, “I would just sit there staring at all the stuff with my name across the back. Like, if I looked away, even for a second, it would all disappear.”

  “Yeah, I feel that.”

  “You don’t seem like an asshole.”

  Eugenio looks at him.

  “I mean, baseball’s full of assholes. You don’t seem like one.”

  “Wow, thanks.” Eugenio lets out a long breath. “Sorry. Fuck. I thought the ump was going to toss me.”

  “Seemed like you were getting close to that.”

  “He said that guys like me always have a temper. You ever get that feeling like it doesn’t matter if you win, you just want the other guy to lose?”

  “Only all the time.”

  “I just get sick of it, pretending like I don’t hear stuff like that.”

  Zach considers the number of times he’s heard teammates talking to each other about him, even if he’s in the same room. About his batting average. About his game calling. About if he can even hear the umpires, as if umpires didn’t also use hand signals. “Yeah, that’s the way it is sometimes.”

  Something flickers in Eugenio’s face, like he’s going to argue that it doesn’t have to be that way. Or like he’s going to throw a cooler or punch a locker or do any of the things frustrated players do. The ones that would prove the umpire right about him. It flickers and then he suppresses it under a neutral expression, a vague half grimace that’s somehow worse than anger. “I should probably go and apologize to whoever.” He pulls himself out of his chair and even that looks kind of exhausted.

  “I told them I’d talk to you,” Zach says. “You can probably say something tomorrow. Give D’Spara some time to let his bad mood blow off.”

  “Oh.” Eugenio sits back down.

  “If you want to rest here, I can wake you up when the game is over.”

  “I’m too keyed up. But thanks.” Eugenio shuts his eyes, like he’s going to fall asleep, regardless of what he said.

  Zach goes to the kitchen and gets two bottles of Gatorade from the fridge. He
sets one by Eugenio, who’s now sitting with his face buried in his hands. Zach hovers a hand over his back. He contemplates pressing his palm to the muscle between his shoulder blades, like he did with Johnson to prevent a meltdown.

  But it’s possible Eugenio would take it to mean something else, here, away from the traffic of the dugout, from their teammates, some of whom will likely clamor back soon. Because it does mean something else, at least to Zach. Just nothing he can say. And so he drops his arm and goes to see about the rest of the game.

  Chapter Five

  Zach gets to the ballpark early the next morning with his usual coffee order seated in a cardboard holder. It’s a cool day, the Phoenix Mountains sitting in the distance, the grass on the diamond freshly watered, the whole place smelling like possibilities and clean dirt.

  He expects to find Eugenio out in the bullpen, eager for coffee and with breakfast and opinions on the right number of hot sauce packets that Zach should apply to it, which is usually one more than Zach actually does.

  Instead, the bullpen is empty. Zach kills time, drinking his coffee and ignoring the conditioned spike of hunger he now gets when he swings open the bullpen gate. A half an hour later, Eugenio still isn’t there, but the rest of the guys are filing in—Johnson, Montelbaum, a few players who’ll be in the rookie instructional league this season, who all still look at the practice fields the way tourists look up at buildings in New York.

  Zach goes to the kitchen to scavenge for breakfast. Morgan is there, staring at the shake she has going in the blender like it holds unrevealed secrets and not protein powder.

  She pauses the blender when she sees Zach. “What’d you tell that kid Johnson?”

  “Shit, what’d he do?”

  “Just came begging for a job.” She pulses the blender a few times, then glances around. “Listen, I would prefer if we just got dinner or something. I don’t particularly want to talk about it here.”